Innovative or Silly?

The problem with trying to be innovative is you have to be as crazy as the people who invented them to see their angle on the product. I thought the loo roll iPod dock was pretty silly, but it’s selling so something must be right.

Imagine the scenario – you’re out and about and you have your iPod with you, but you want to go dancing, climb a wall or go skinny dipping in a fountain. Previously you would have to leave your belongings unsecured, leave them with a friend or find a cloakroom. Neither of these are good scenarios, so Sinox thinks it has the solution. Sinox has several portable locks for those who want security on the move, in both generic and specific formats.
Above you can see a simple application of its PSP lock.
Here you can see an iPod being locked to a rail. This is of course, is a completely logical thing to do.

Personally, I don’t even feel happy locking my bike up in public, let alone leaving an electronic device on show. Although it stops people from picking it up and leaving in a hurry, the cable is so thin that it wouldn’t take much to cut through it. Considering the amount of bikes I see with kicked in wheels, I imagine if it can’t be stolen it will just get broken.

If you don’t lock it up in public as Sinox is suggesting, but rather just lock it up indoors, then it could be considered a little bit of extra security. Perhaps I’m being a bit too cynical, but for several reasons I can’t see the iPod lock catching on.
Finally, we have “Water Cooling Viagra”. I wonder if Sytrin quite understood what Viagra was when they chose to make this sign, but it was described to me as a “water cooling enhancer”. In actuality, it is a water chiller. It uses a TEC/Peltier to chill the water that passes through it and should be compatible with any water cooler than uses the same tubing size. Cooling water down does have the added issue of possible condensation and TECs aren’t all that efficient so there will quite a bit of extra hot air around.